


Hoarse

by Selkit



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Developing Relationship, F/M, Fluff, Huddling For Warmth, Jyn is Stubborn and Cassian is Concerned, Prompt Fic, Sharing a Bed, Sick Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-02
Updated: 2017-02-02
Packaged: 2018-09-21 15:51:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9555932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Selkit/pseuds/Selkit
Summary: Hoth is cold and nasty and miserable...but it does have its advantages.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by a Tumblr prompt: _The way you said ‘I love you’ - with a hoarse voice, under the blankets._

After everything—half a lifetime of abandonment and solitude, finding and losing her father in the space of seconds, putting up with the Rebellion’s various theatrics, a multitude of narrow escapes from death—it’s the damn cold on Hoth that finally does Jyn in.

Logically speaking, she knows why the Alliance chose this wasteland of a planet for its new base: because no one else is quite that desperate. Just looking out the window might give you frostbite if you’re not careful. The entire globe is so frigid that even the most dogged pirates and scavengers abandoned the place centuries ago, which is saying a lot. Jyn’s dealt with more than a few of their ilk over the years. She knows what they’ll endure for a score.

But she’s made it through worse, she thinks. She won’t let bad weather, of all things, be the tipping point that finally breaks her.

Until one morning, as she’s walking through one of the carved ice tunnels that passes for hallways in the base, she feels the first nagging prickle of sick in the back of her throat.

She does what she does best: she swallows it down and ignores it.

Like usual, that doesn’t work.

“You should really go to the infirmary,” Bodhi tells her that evening, in that gently anxious way he has. He sits across from her in the mess hall, watching as she pushes congealing rations around on her plate. She pauses to ferociously blow her nose every few seconds. 

“So they can do what?” Jyn rasps. Even to her own ears, her voice sounds like it’s been put through a meat grinder. She buries her mouth in the crook of her elbow, her whole body jerking with the force of her wet, rattling coughs. “Their time is better spent on people who actually need them. Bacta does nothing for a cold, anyway.”

At Bodhi’s dubious look, she adds, “I’ll be fine. I just need sleep.”

She says it as firmly as possible, but her body goes out of its way to undermine the conviction in her words, tottering and swaying as she attempts to stand. She feels like a drunken spectator at the kind of backwater podrace that sells cheap ale for two credits a pint. (Not that she would know firsthand.)

“Ah,” Bodhi says, his hand hovering by the elbow she just used as a handkerchief. Under other circumstances, Jyn might hope her sleeve isn’t too drenched with spit and snot, but at the moment she’s past caring.

“Can you make it?” Bodhi is saying, and Jyn forces herself to focus.

“I have a cold,” she says. “It’s not as though I’m on my deathbed. Stay here and enjoy your food.”

She punctuates the words with a massive sneeze. When her eyes have stopped watering enough to make out Bodhi’s features again, she sees him with his arm half-raised, as though to ward off germs through sheer willpower. He looks down at his plate with an almost mournful expression.

“I’ll try,” he says.

* * *

Two hours later, Jyn is no closer to sleep than she was at the top of Scarif’s tower.

The thin standard-issue pallet is chilly on the best of nights, but tonight it feels like she might as well be lying out on the frozen tundra under the open sky, the ice seeping into her bones. She pulls open the drawers in her room’s one forlorn dresser and throws on every item of clothing she owns, then tugs the rough-woven blanket over the whole ensemble, tucking it in tight at her knees and shoulders.

It’s not enough.

Finally she tosses the blanket back with enough force to leave it pooled on the floor beside the cot. She fishes her boots out from beneath the pallet and slips them on, then toggles her door switch with a weary press of her thumb. Even that small movement makes her fingers ache in protest as they slowly unfurl, stiff and numb with the cold.

She must look like something that stumbled in off the streets of Coruscant’s seedy lower levels after a long bad night, all mussed hair and bloodshot eyes and stumbling feet. But to her luck, it’s only a few doors down to her destination, and she encounters no one but a few stray astro droids. It’s possible they might whistle cheerful greetings to her as she passes, but her ears are so blocked up that she’s not entirely sure.

She reaches the door and steadies herself against it before she lets her hand fall across the panel. She’s not sure whether to be relieved or not when it glows green, granting her access.

Inside, it’s as dark as K-2’s chassis, and she pauses to let her eyes adjust. The door slips shut behind her, and that doesn’t help, choking off the last few shreds of light from the dimmed hallway. Even so, the quarters on the base are all laid out the same—the Rebellion on a budget doesn’t have much left over for architectural variety—and she stretches out her hands to infiltrate the black, groping her way over to the cot easily enough.

She gets little more than the slightest mattress-creak of warning before something hard and blunt jams into the space between her ribs, forceful enough that it might take her breath away if the clogging gunk in her lungs hadn’t gotten there first.

“Freeze,” a voice growls in her ear, sharp and guttural and devoid of the warmth she didn’t realize she’d come to expect.

“I already am,” she manages, closing her fingers around Cassian’s hand on the blaster hilt. “That’s why I’m here.”

It doesn’t occur to her until this very moment, with Cassian’s grip still unyielding under hers and his teeth bared against her ear, that her damn cold might have warped her voice beyond recognition. She can barely even understand herself at this point, every sinus stuffed up with Force-knows-what.

She allows herself a brief moment to marinate in the irony that she may very well escape Alliance bombs and Death Star blasts—twice—only to die by Cassian’s blaster in the middle of the night, because she’s too sick to be understood. All for the crime of trying to get warm.

“It’s me,” she manages, trying to tug his blaster away from her ribs. “Jyn.”

She can pinpoint the exact moment it finally gets through to him. It’s still too dark to see his face, but the blaster falls away so sharply she can hear it rattle against the cot’s edge, followed by a shaky curse in Cassian’s native language. She’s been slowly picking it up word by word the more time she spends around him—mostly expletives at first, but she hasn’t heard this one before. It must be particularly blistering.

“Didn’t mean to startle you,” she says, beginning to sway. Distantly she realizes the words sound strange, but this time it’s because she’s pushing them out through chattering teeth. Cassian breathes something else, then she feels his arm circle around her hips and up between her shoulder blades. She lets herself sag gratefully against him, and feels the press of his other hand against her forehead.

“You’re burning up.” His hand slips down to cup her jaw, his fingers splayed on her cheek. She can just make out the glint of his eyes, flashing with something she can’t identify. “When Bodhi said you weren’t feeling well, I thought it was just—”

He cuts himself off with a sharp shake of his head that she feels more than sees. “Come on,” he says. “Let’s get you to the infirmary.”

“Oh, for Force’s sake,” Jyn mumbles. “Why does everyone keep trying to get me to go to the infirmary? And I am not burning up. I’m _freezing._ I just need to get warm enough to sleep.”

Cassian’s hand leaves her skin long enough to switch on a bedside lamp. The light casts him in sharp relief, and she can see the worry creasing his face in long dark strokes. For a moment she thinks he’s about to attempt to sling her over his shoulder and carry her to the infirmary himself.

She opens her mouth to slur some variant of _I’d like to see you try,_ but before she can get the words out, she feels Cassian’s hands at her waist and shoulders. He gently turns her toward the door.

“Let’s go,” he murmurs, taking a step forward. At the back of her mind, Jyn realizes that the downside of him supporting most of her weight is that she has little choice but to follow.

“You owe me for this,” she mutters, letting her head loll on his shoulder.

“If you let the droids give you medicine,” he says, “I’ll take you anywhere you want afterward.”

Jyn pauses. “Anywhere?”

“Anywhere on the base,” he amends.

Jyn considers this. “Okay.”

She falls in step with him, soaking in the warmth of his neck beneath her forehead, the palm of his hand against her waist.

* * *

The med droids take one look at her and _tsk,_ and Jyn wants to shoot whoever programmed them to do that. Yet she has to admit that whatever concoction they give her eases the ferocious chill in her bones and the chattering of her teeth. Even her breath comes a little less labored.

“Better?” Cassian asks. He’s sitting in a chair by her bed, leaning over with his elbows on his knees, hands loosely clasped in front of him. Jyn’s not too sick to have noticed a few occasions when his hand strayed up as though to touch her before drifting back.

Her head’s also cleared enough to see the dark purple-black smudged beneath his eyes, and the line of his mouth, taut with fatigue. It’s enough to drive a quick jolt of guilt deep in her chest. He could have been sleeping peacefully if she hadn’t—

“Jyn.”

This time he does touch her, two fingers feather-light on her jaw. It draws her eyes to his face, and she blinks, feeling the weight of her own exhaustion settle on her.

“Yes,” she says. “Better.” Then she adds, “Thank you.”

He dips his head, the curve of his lips balancing out the lines in his face.

“All right,” he says. “Now for my end of the bargain. Where to?”

He looks at her, and there’s something heavy in his gaze. Something almost like hope.

“I’m still a bit cold,” Jyn says. “And tired. And your quarters are closer than mine.”

Cassian smiles.

* * *

Back in his chambers, Jyn stands off to the side of the room, peeling off her boots and one of her layers of clothing, letting them drop to a tattered little pile on the floor. She wraps her arms around herself, shoving her fists beneath her armpits, waiting for Cassian to climb into the bed first.

It _should_ feel tense, she thinks. Or awkward, or heavy with a sense of taboo. They don’t usually do this, after all, aside from catching a few fleeting hours of sleep pressed back to back on the occasional mission where space is tight or heat is scarce. And yet, it doesn’t. Maybe it’s just the sickness stealing away the usual walls around her personal space, the ones she keeps tightly guarded. Maybe it’s something else, something indefinable shifting between them.

Once Cassian is on the far side of the bed, blanket pulled up to his waist, Jyn crawls in after him. Her first instinct is to turn on her side and lie with her back to his chest, yet something in his face makes her want to linger there, where she can see it.

She settles in, legs bent so her knees touch his, their faces inches apart. She tucks her arms in, sandwiched between them, her hand resting on his chest.

“I’m sorry in advance that you’ll probably have this in a few days,” she says, dipping her head to muffle a cough in the sheets. “Whatever it is.”

Cassian breathes something that sounds like a chuckle. “It’s all right.”

“I don’t usually get sick like this.” Jyn already feels drowsiness stealing over her, pulling at her eyelids, thickening her voice. “I think it’s this awful planet. Even my cell back on Wobani was more hospitable.”

She finally gives in to the heaviness, letting her eyes drift closed. She feels Cassian pulling the blanket up tighter around her, tucking it over her shoulders. His arm settles over her waist, tugging her closer against him, and then his fingers are in her hair, gently working through the tangles.

“I hope,” he says, his voice barely above a murmur, “that the sleeping arrangements are more preferable here, at least.”

Jyn smiles, warmth covering her at last. “Much more.”


End file.
